


September 11th, Texas

by Julesin



Series: Runaways, or That Feel When Multiverse Theory is Confirmed Canon [15]
Category: Everyman HYBRID, MLAndersen0, Marble Hornets, Stan Frederick, Tribe Twelve, Whisperedfaith - Fandom
Genre: Even More Characters!, Gen, More plot, Noah is Awkward and Unsure How to Interact With People and Honestly That's a Mood, Trans Lee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 18:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13195683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Julesin/pseuds/Julesin
Summary: And that makes fourteen.





	September 11th, Texas

He woke up that morning desperately not wanting to interact with any human beings.

Never had he been so tired. He’d been driving for months, staying in motels and inns and wherever would take him for the night. Every night he logged where he was and what date it was. Made sure he hadn’t lost time. Listened to the blade sing for an hour or two.

It was almost comforting at this point.

His mind traveled back to the conversation he’d been forced into the night before. Unwanted visitors, unwanted requests. He was busy. But they had had a point, a good point, in that he hadn’t been threatened in months and he also was making no progress whatsoever.

That stung, but it was correct.

The knock on the door startled him out of his musings, and his head whipped to the clock. He’d spent almost 30 minutes thinking, which was a little unnerving, but it was also too early for room service. He reached for his knife, gripping it tightly, and slipped out of bed and towards the door. Thank god for his anxious habit of wearing clothes to bed.

There was no peephole, so he could only crack open the door and hope he didn’t die.

“Lee?”

Hearing his name was so strange. He hadn’t been around anyone who knew him in months. He opened the door wider.

The man on the other side was entirely unfamiliar. His hair was short but wild, curling and framing his face like a traumatic painting. The bruises under his eyes were dark, and the eyes themselves were set deep in his face, giving him an almost ghost-like appearance. His facial hair was scruffy, barely kept, and Lee had a feeling he’d worn that shirt at least two days in a row.

He felt an inexplicable kinship to this man.

“My name is Noah Maxwell. Um, you’re the Lee who runs the WhisperedFaith Youtube channel, right?”

Lee pushed the door open completely. “That’s right.” God, it was weird to use his voice again.

“Good.” The man, Noah, seemed relieved. “Damien told us you were here, but you never know.”

Ah, of course. These were the people his visitor had mentioned. He seemed to remember them saying their name, but his memory was failing him. It was probably Damien.

“The rest of us are downstairs, out in the parking lot by the cars. We figured you’d want meet everyone before deciding whether to come. Damien did tell you that’s why we were here, right?” Lee nodded, and Noah let out a little sigh of alleviation. “Okay, cool. Do you want to do that now, or…?”

Lee held up a finger to pause the conversation and moved further back into the room to grab his jacket and shoes. It was getting colder.

One would probably question why he was so willing to just go along with a stranger, but when someone just appears in your hotel room out of thin air and exasperatedly tells you the world is ending and you’re one of the only people who can stop it, you stop being skeptical of shit. He was already pretty open to weird things with all he’d been through, but this just took the cake. It didn’t help that ‘Damien’ or whoever they were knew almost everything about what he’d been through, including events that hadn’t happened on camera. He tended to believe people like that.

Trust was hard to find, though.

When Damien had said ‘A group of people,’ Lee hadn’t expected more than five, but here he was, walking towards more like twelve. They all seemed to share some common themes: dark bruises under the eyes, unkempt hair, ripped or otherwise old-looking clothes, and a very intense aura of pain and suffering. It was like sharing the same air with thirteen copies of himself, and he couldn’t decide if it was comforting or actual torture. 

They introduced themselves, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to remember them all, and barely paid attention at this point.

“So? Are you coming with us?” Lee blinked out of his small haze. The speaker wasn’t Noah, but one of the others. He wore a striped blue sweater and glasses, his messy short hair framing a naturally irritated expression. Lee had a feeling he was someone not to mess with.

Though he did look like a total nerd.

“I, uh, I don’t know. Probably. Do I really have a choice?”

It was meant as a rhetorical question, but Noah quickly responded, “You do. You always have a choice.”

The hurried response indicated they’d talked about this. Lee's question was expected. “That’s fair… Sure, I’ll come. Not like I have anything better to do right now.” He looked back at the hotel. “I have some things to get first.”

Noah nodded, looking relieved again. “I’ll come help.”

He headed back towards the hotel, but Lee stopped after a few steps. “Wait, there’s another thing.” He turned back to the group. “I found this in my pocket yesterday morning.”

The key clanked against his phone as he drew it out of his pocket, wrapping the chain around his wrist. Dim light glinted off the silver item, momentarily blinding him. 

“What is it?” one of the others asked.

“It’s a key, dumbass,” said one of the girls.

Lee inspected it carefully, like he hadn’t been doing that all morning. “I can’t put it down. If I do, it just comes back.”

One of the guys standing close to the nerdy one gave him a confused look. “What do you mean?”

Lee pushed through them and set the key down on the hood of the car. He stepped back, letting them move in to take a closer look. After a moment, he turned his back on them, looking towards the hotel and Noah, standing a few feet away with his arms folded. There was a collective sound of confusion behind him, and he felt the key drop back into his pocket. He turned back, pulling it out again.

“That’s wild,” one of the other guys muttered, leaning in to look at it again. He was shorter than some of the others, hair covering his left eye. “And you just found it? It just showed up?” Lee nodded. “Fucking wild.” The man standing close beside him, wearing a thick sweater and bearing scars around his throat, giggled quietly, earning a glare.

“Anyway, just thought it was important.” Lee put the key back out of sight. “We can go pack now.”

He and Noah left for his hotel room once again. Noah tried to pretend he wasn’t looking around once they were inside, but it was very obvious that he was searching for something, even if it was just something familiar. He didn’t seem surprised by how tidy the room was—one learned to be neat when one was constantly moving. 

“So, um,” Noah began as Lee picked his shirt from the night before up off the floor. “Did, um, did you notice anything that you have, like, questions about…?”

Lee gave him an odd look before rolling up the shirt and sliding it into his bag. “What do you mean?”

Noah huffed, looking oddly nervous. “I mean like, anything. About the group. That you think is weird, or you want to know more about.”

“Noah, if there’s something you want to tell me about, do so, because I’m probably not gonna get it.”

He blew hair out of his face irritatedly. “Okay, so don’t, like, freak out on me or anything, but… There are a lot of interconnecting relationships going on in our group.”

“Okay.”

“That doesn’t, like, weird you out or anything?”

Lee turned back around, throwing his jacket over his shoulder more out of a place to put it than anything. “Do you mean that a lot of you are dating each other, that you’re mostly queer and polyamorous?”

Noah nodded wordlessly, face tinged red. 

“That’s all you had to say.” 

His shoulders raised self-consciously, and he couldn’t look Lee in the eye. “That’s not strange?”

Lee lifted an eyebrow. “Um, no? Dude, I had a crush on my best friend Mo from the day I met him.” He paused, letting the loneliness and despair work its way through his system silently. “Plus, I’m trans, so it’s not a big deal.”

His guest blinked repeatedly, looking shocked. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out, and he quickly closed it again, looking like he didn’t know what to say and was quite irritated by it.

“Are you gonna help me finish packing, or what?”

Noah nodded, grabbing Lee’s boots off the ground near his feet.

Once they were finished, Lee shouldered his backpack and zipped up his jacket, patting the pocket where his knife now rested. They headed for the elevator back down. Once inside, an awkward air fell.

“I didn’t know you were trans.”

Lee gave Noah an amused look. “Obviously. Yeah, I found out pretty early. School was a struggle, but Mo was constantly supportive. Always made me feel better, never let me say anything bad about myself. Even threatened to beat people up if they misgendered me.”

Noah was quiet for a moment. “He sounds great.”

“Yeah.”

The silence resumed, and it was still awkward, but with a hint of understanding. They reached the parking lot quickly and joined the rest of the group.

“All set?” the nerdy guy asked as they approached. 

Lee nodded. Now that he knew, he could very obviously tell that this particular group of people was closer than just a bunch of friends. The brushing of hands, the loving looks, the almost complete lack of space between them. How he hadn’t seen it before he had no idea.

“Wait, before we leave,” one of them interrupted, before Lee could get very far towards his car. It was the man with dark hair, in the flannel. He looked sort of familiar, but Lee couldn’t put his finger on it. “There’s someone else, someone you’re supposed to lead us to. Her name is Story?”

Ahh. Interesting. “Is she supposed to join us as well?”

The man nodded.

“I do actually know where she is, for once. We’ve been keeping in fairly irregular contact, but I can take you to her. It’s actually not very far, though it may be a couple of days. Just follow me, I’ll lead you there.” Lee gave a small two-fingered salute before heading to his car. 

Getting back into the driver’s seat was like sliding back into his skin. Driving, driving, searching, sleeping, driving. That had been the routine for so long. But now he had something else to do, something apparently far more important. The knife continued to sing, muffled by his jacket. 

Having people around was a good change of pace.

Seeing Story again would be nice, too.

**Author's Note:**

> K! So some things
> 
> Bad news: I may not have another chapter next week. I'm unsure if I'll have it done in time, I've been sick with a pretty nasty chest cold for the past two weeks and have been doing a lot of sleeping and basically no writing. I'll try to get it done, and if I do, I'll post it on time and it'll be a miracle. If not, I'll get it out the week after  
> Good news: While I may not have gotten much actual writing done, I did do a lot of planning for something else, a strictly Michael/Evan fic that may or may not come out some time in the future. I'm really happy with what I have planned, and I think you'll like it too ;3
> 
> And finally, for those of you have left comments on any of these, I'm so sorry I never respond to them! I'm really awkward and never know what to say, but rest assured that I see every single one and they all make me squeak and blush in happiness  
> Thank you for reading so far! I hope to see you next week


End file.
